


time carry you

by dramatorama



Category: Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 22:22:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3912784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dramatorama/pseuds/dramatorama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Rinoa is lost in possibility.</p>
            </blockquote>





	time carry you

Time's a feather in here;

Time carries her quick and slow across great history-currents that take your breath - there's her first boyfriend, once he carried a sword but now he raises bare fists and shouts at a crowd baying back at him. She looks at him level: he does not see her. She sees that this time, he is happy. 

Around her the moon cracks and falls and spews out death in small measures of tooth and claw and one great gleaming serpent's coil. She tries to raise her hands, to draw a path from her life-lines, but the gaping, melting holes between them suggest that this time, little girl, you lost. There's no sure route out of time, it's caught her by her heels and stolen the air from lungs she's not sure she has any more. 

She thinks of Squall. She thinks of him lost and drowning and time obliges; here's where a cruel sea took him at seventeen, a boy rent by war and abandoned. Here's the boy that lost his sister and never spoke again; he's seventeen and banging his wrists against his bed frame, as he has done for ten years, his shaven head bowed low. She leaves him there before the nurses come, because she's seen this one before. 

Where is your truth? time asks, and she doesn't know, she doesn't _know,_ because each time she circles these lives unlived they become more convincing. She's always fought for truth. This many truths at once are hard to hold together inside herself: she's collapsing, the melt-lines are tearing her in places she is, and was, and always could have been, the wings at her back are not weightless but _heavy_. There's where the bomb took down the plate and took her arm _(what?)_ there's where Moenbryda fell _(what?)_ there's sweet Vivi at her wedding _(what?)_ and she begins to understand. 

There can only be one past, one future, and she forms her hands back and pulls it like a tide around her. This will be home.

 

Afterward, she won't remember. That's how she'd wanted it.

**Author's Note:**

> Final Fantasy reminds me of the Dark Tower. Familiar things crop up in places where you shouldn't expect to find them. In FFXIV, Jessie is an engineer working for Cid Garlond. And I think Rinoa would have found herself quite at home in AVALANCHE, or indeed leading the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. 
> 
> I am so up for a Dark TowerAll-World / FFVI crossover after this.


End file.
